A Case-based Study of Jury Instructions in Hong Kong

The previous studies on jury instructions are limited to the legalese, such as the lexical and syntactic features of jury instructions. There is, however, no comparable scholarship discussing jury instructions from the pragmatic and discursive perspectives. To fill in the gap, this study, drawing on the authentic court judgments from Hong Kong Judiciary, aims to demonstrate why the maxims are expected to be observed when the judges are delivering their instructions to the jury, that Cooperative Principle has the interpretative force on jury instructions in thecase of maxim violation. This study focuses on the analysis of jury instructions from the perspective of the maxim of manner.